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About

Karen Craigo

My son sees no point in learning French, but I’ve labeled everything, le lit, le divan, le chat. Nor is it my favorite, so many letters unpronounced like lights left on all day in a vacant room, and my accent is terrible. Nevertheless, le miroir is speckled with le dentifrice, la bouilliore sings like l’oiseau in la cuisine. I tell him he might need this— one day he could broker la détente or order a nice vin de France for someone tres jolie. And maybe it’s enough just to spot les histoires our own words lug along like a portmanteau. At the end of all this, he’ll know some nouns, and he’ll pronounce them like I do, poorly, with a soupçon of defiance at so much wasted, so much left unsaid.

Cow Ridge

Return is inevitable, so the lead cow draws a heavy line home. On the ridge they are backlit, they cast blue shadows, their bodies umber and red, like the insides of your lids when you press them with a thumb. Their path defines the break between night and day and from here it is illuminated, a wash of milk. Evenings they descend in perfect glory, heads down, steps measured. Is this how we know we’re not wild? We spend days eating clover like it’s our job until something in us is iron and wants the magnet home. It’s just past solstice. The sky will be pale for hours, long after these sisters lie down in their rows, long after horses start to dream on the hoof.

Storm Signs

You don’t need crenelated clouds, darkening sky. Before, the birds move in a frenzy of which-tree and the trees themselves tell you, almost in words and in the whiter undersides of upturned leaves.

In lotus, nothing is still in me. My fingers touch in two raindrops, my face turned to the sky. Nothing is still in me. The storm is always coming, it is never here, never just passed. Nothing, still in me.

When I was a child I could smell electrons in air. That was me, as alive as I’d ever be. A storm might sneak up on me if I was lost in play, but never if I was paying attention.

Small Case Against Perfect Solitude

Sometimes I listen for that inner lake whose ripples come and come. When there is nothing I feel empty, but not in the desired way, empty- but-waiting-to-be- filled—just alone, maybe a little hungry. And what words arrive are jarring, like a sneeze between movements, a ringtone in a basilica. I prefer the murmur of voices in the west gallery, furnace hum, a sketcher dropping a pencil, its paradiddle as it rolls across the tile.

Field Trip

Today the butterfly house releases monarchs, tags affixed like tiny suitcases for their flight south. A docent points out a mourning cloak, faded and ripped, three weeks old and probably still laying eggs. She keeps going until she dies, he tells me, and at forty-five, with a toddler, I can relate. One of the children has stolen the wing of a sulphur. It was dead anyway, so she palmed it, and now, fingers flaked in gold leaf, she tries to work off its color. I remember how we’d look for signs of fall these early days of it in a world tinged in sepia before brown shocks waited for harvest. Those days the sun could surprise us with its insistence, could pin you to your chair, and you’d picture those migrating butterflies, gold, gold, gold, gold, gone.

Karen Craigo is the author of two chapbooks, Someone Could Build Something Here (Winged City, 2013) and Stone for An Eye (The Kent State University Press, 2004). She lives and writes in Springfield, Missouri, and authors the daily blog Better View of the Moon.

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